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To: grey_whiskers

I like O’Rourke and Barry. Have they been slamming us poor Texans?


446 posted on 09/03/2011 11:13:56 AM PDT by Mind-numbed Robot (I retain the right to be inconsistent, contradictory and even flat-out wrong!)
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To: Mind-numbed Robot
Dave Barry is the one I was thinking of for Texas: in particular, since this is a GOP primary, he covered what happened when Bush ("Dubya") got into town:

No, seriously, the official theme, as far as I can tell, is" "We're Texans, and By God We're From Texas!" This place is infested with Texans, who simply cannot get over how Texan they are. Many of them are wearing cowboy hats, though I suspect they're mainly business people who have never personally interacted with a cow that was not in the form of prime rib. Source

To be fair to Dubya, though, he *did* relax by performing hard manual labor, clearing brush in Crawford, rather than golfing on Martha's Vineyard. And he trashed the editors of Mountain Bike magazine, doing 2 hour rides at 800 calories an hour (including 20 mph on the pavement on a fat tire bike!). As I wrote in a vanity mocking a liberal's complaints about Sarah Palin, contrasting her to Dubya :

When the Bush/Cheney Cowboy Show was in town, all their 'worst' tendencies could be expressed and not only was it not frowned upon, hell, it was national policy. Hunting as a pastime, and in earnest?!! Good God, didn't they know that John Kerry's (who by the way served himself in Viet Nam, and still hasn't released his SF180) line "Can I get me a huntin' license here?" was for the rubes? And George Bush, instead of going to Martha's Vineyard like a sensible person (or at least Kennebunkport like his father -- they're both Yale men and OUGHT to know better) -- instead, he went to rural TEXAS, where there are no decent restaurants, no theatre companies, no gay bars. And he cleared BRUSH, performing hard manual labor, like a mere PEASANT. Like Sarah Palin field-dressing a moose! And how cruel to shoot a moose for food. How much more humane to get your free-range, organically processed meats (if you must indulge in carnivorism) off the shelf at Whole Foods with your Arugula, the way Gaia intended.

P.J. O'Rourke has a Master's Degree from Johns Hopkins, so he picks on Harvard more.

He's too long to excerpt much, but he had a whole chapter from Holidays in Hell on visiting Harvard's 350th birthday bash. He manages to work Reagan into it:

The next morning was the great Foundation Day convocation, which President Reagan wasn't addressing. You may remember the press flap. Harvard wanted the President to give a 350th birthday speech as Franklin Roosevelt had done at the 300th and Grover Cleveland at the 250th. But Harvard didn't want to give the President an honorary degree. I guess they felt Reagan was a nice man, and, no doubt, important in his way, but not quite Harvard material. Once again, they're right. Reagan would have dozed off during "Gym Transit" even faster than I. So the President, God bless him, told Harvard to go piss up a rope. And Harvard had to go shopping for somebody else. I'm sure they were looking for a person who embodied democratic spirit, intellectual excellence and the American ethos, which is why they picked Prince Charles.

Cheers!

448 posted on 09/03/2011 12:04:15 PM PDT by grey_whiskers (The opinions are solely those of the author and are subject to change without notice.)
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